Can we say with sincerity that we are committed to peace?
Make peace, not war: With the world now spending one million million dollars on the military per year and fifty-four percent of peace agreements breaking down within five years of signature, can we say with sincerity that we’re committed to peace?
From Swords to Plowshares
Since the late 1960s, Seymour Melman, professor emeritus at Columbia University, has championed the conversion project ® from a military to civilian economy ® and has deliberated on the public good we could achieve for the money we spend on the military.
Technological enhancements to conventional weaponry may be redundant in a world with nuclear arms, but there’s no denying that the civilian sector has absorbed military-derived innovation over the years.
We are all part of military culture, at times of war and peace. Whether we know it or not, we incriminate ourselves every time we use technological innovations known as “spin-offs,�? which have arisen from military-sponsored research and later get adopted by civil society. Since Napoleon, the long line of spin-offs have included canned foods, plastics, microwave technology, radar, lasers, the Internet, night vision, jet engines, cell phones, GPS systems, Gore-Tex, frozen foods, and power bars.
British economist Mary Kaldor noted in The Baroque Arsenal, however, that most military research conducted post WWII was for devices too specialized and sophisticated to have any application in the civilian marketplace, which thrives on cheap, dependable, mass-produced goods.
Since the second Gulf War, the tide has turned: the military has begun to make use of goods produced in the civilian sector. Aptly called “spin-ons,�? technological tools developed by the civilian sector that now benefit the military include off-the-shelf commercial information technology (computer workstations, laptop computers, database software, networks), specialized graphic processors developed by Hollywood and the video game industry (for simulators and communications and surveillance gear), and e-mail, which allows for “open-source intelligence�? and the critical debate around what for too long has been stamped Top Secret.
